"What if we imagined a world without private property; a world where access replaced ownership?"

The Revolutionary Principle.

Six degrees down, everyone on the planet is connected.

Great changes happen when a given system reaches breaking point. In our view, capitalism as a global system is past breaking point. We await something totally new, or a catastrophic global collapse.

Cognizant of three things - the global financial crisis, the coming end of the age of oil, and the indignity and inequality inherent to the money system - we turned our eyes towards barter as an interim solution to survival on a planetary scale.

The likes of the Venus Project speak of tomorrow. Barter is possible today. We want to encourage life without money, not only in theory, but in practice.

Learning to live without money may be the only way the human race can prevent the global war that capitalism's collapse will almost certainly lead to.

Global Barter Revolution Manifesto, v1.1

From WordNet (r) 2.0:bartern: an equal exchange; "we had no money so we had to live by barter" [syn: swap, swop, trade]
v: exchange goods without involving money

Some time ago it suddenly struck us that social networks like Facebook allow people to see the sixth degree of separation in their lives - layered connections of friends of friends. We do favours for our friends all the time and money never enters the equation. What if this principle could be extended to the friends of friends, reciprocally?

What if the sixth degree of separation meant that you have millions of friends, and money could be delinked from these friendships?

Capitalism and the money economy are in crisis while they are also forging the base of a one world currency and one world tyranny. Ecologically, the planet is being ravaged, and millions starve or are marginalised. When we look at the planetary reality, it is shameful. The situation continues, in part, because we perceive those outside our immediate circle as strangers, not the friends of friends, though six degrees of separation connect us to everyone.

Barter is the alternative to surviving by monetary exchange. In the barter economy there is no such thing as private property; rather, all that exists is transferred and acquired according to need. Anything not needed, at any particular time, can be offered and exchanged for anything of need. Indeed, the basis of barter is to reciprocally fulfil the needs of the other.

We are not techno-evangelists, but it nonetheless struck us that networks like Facebook could be used progressively to ground a different kind of world. A world where wars couldn't happen, where poverty could be eradicated, and where the needs of all could be answered, via the six degrees of friendship. Non-monetary bartering would be the base of this alternative world, and would help it come into existence.

The beauty of the six degrees of separation is that, in effect, it could be possible to disconnect the direct reciprocal relationship in bartering. A friend needs something that you have. Perhaps the friend does not have something that you need, but a friend of that friend does. Via the six degrees of friendship reciprocal benefit could be attained.

And in delinking exchange from monetary value, and rooting it in use value, the reciprocity need not be equal monetarily.

You could trade a camera for a car; an art class for a set of books you no longer read; a meeting with a theoretical physicist for a week on a beach. Amid the complexity of six degrees of reciprocity, and the divergence in what people may need and find useful at a given moment, monetary value would be broken as a standard, offering a way to move beyond money as a measure.

WE THINK social networking technology suggests this possibility. So we want to build an interface based on this idea. The world needs to get beyond money, but it lacks a means.

WE ASK that if you agree with this vision, and are interested in developing it, that you discuss it with your friends, and help us find and build a team who could achieve it. We need developers, mathematicians, software engineers, UI designers, and marketers. We need to come together to imagine the possibilities, and make the possible real.

By the theory of the six degrees of separation, anyone can reach anyone else through friends and their friends. Imagine that via bartering and the six degrees of separation the whole world could open up to you.